Art and theater reviews covering Seattle to Olympia, Washington, with other art, literature and personal commentary.
If you want to ask a question about any of the shows reviewed here please email the producing venue (theater or gallery) or email me at alec@alecclayton.com. If you post questions in the comment section the answer might get lost.

Friday, September 29, 2017

“Operative Hyena with Rabbit?” ceramic sculpture by Joe Batt, courtesy South Puget Sound Community College

“Where’s the Xanax?” mixed media by Liza Brenner, courtesy South Puget Sound Community College

When walking into
the art galleryat South Puget Sound
Community College, the first thing to greet the eye is a curtain of hanging
white porcelain shapes suspended by clear monofilament line. It is like a bead
curtain, but it is not beads. It is a representation of genome sequencing. It
is called “The Life and Genome of Henrietta Lacks.” Lacks was an African-American
woman whose cancer cells were used in breakthrough medical studies. Some of the
white porcelain forms look like bones, some like figures. Looking at it, I was
reminded of dancing skeleton puppets. So we have here an intriguing piece of
art that reflects on science and history, and which is a visual treat.

From a
contemplation of genomes we go to geology with Sean Barnes’s series of
sculptures using anthropogenic materials and processes. There is one
free-standing sculpture on a pedestal that looks like quartz and other rock
formations fused together. Within it is a cell phone case that appears to be
part of the rock. Nearby is a group of similar works in box frames that hang on
the gallery wall. All are rough and gritty organic abstractions that combine
natural geologic formations with man-made items such as tape, a shard from a
broken tea cup. They are visual representations of the essential beauty of
natural and made materials. Part of the beauty of it is that the made materials
tend to disappear into the natural rock.

As art depicting
genomes lead the eye and mind to anthropogenic materials, we next go to a
series of works by Joe Batt that combine animals and humans with cell phones,
towers and space exploration. We have seen in previous shows and entire gallery
installations at SPSCC, Tacoma community College and Salon Refu that Batt
continually creates worlds of electronic communications wherein animals and
humans become part of the mechanical and scientific worlds humans have created.
Here we see a group of hyenas with electronics strapped to their backs
confronting a white bunny rabbit. One of the hyenas is vicious looking, making
the viewer wonder what kind of horrifying future world we are seeing and how
near are we to seeing it become reality.

Batt is also
showing a charcoal drawing done directly on the gallery wall with digitally
collaged images of people, birds, an elephant and a cell phone tower on the
face of a mountain. The textures and drawing are quite intriguing due to the
manner in which the actual texture of the wall blends with the illusory texture
of the drawing.

Liza Brenner is
showing two large mixed-media depictions of urban scenes that seem to be set in
an earlier time, perhaps the 18th century. I approached these with
mixed reactions, thinking on the one hand that they are too illustrational and
almost corny, but admiring the artist’s technical skill and some of the
surrealistic elements such as shadowy figures and a snake wearing a crown.

I admired Nathan
Barnes’s two works, “Stifle” and “Diaspora.” These are pop-surreal images
typical of the work for which Barnes is well known. They are colorful, strange,
and beautifully executed with great skill and attention to detail. I had an
opportunity to talk to Barnes about these pieces and learned that the models
for the faces, like the models for many of his constructed paintings, were
relatives, and that every element in them refers to something historical or
personally relevant, Whether or not the viewer is privy to the stories behind
his paintings, they are fascinating to look at. Make up your own stories, and
then if Barnes, who manages the gallery, happens to be there, ask him to
explain.

I enjoyed opening night of Footloose at Tacoma Musical Playhouse.
It’s a rocking good, high-energy show with great music and dancing. The music
is mostly up-tempos rock and roll blended with a touch of gospel and show
tunes, and an occasional sweet love song such as the beautiful “Almost
Paradise,” a duet between Ren (Jake Atwood) and Ariel (Jessica Furnstahl) a Romeo and Juliet-like balcony scene with
sparkling electricity between the two.

Footloose is a simple but well
told story of clashes between youth and age, small-town uptightness and
big-city wildness. Ren and his mother (Linda Palacios) move from Chicago to the
small town of Beaumont, Tex., to live with a relative after Ren’s father leaves
them. Ren is rebellious and carries a huge chip on his shoulder. And he loves
to dance. He is shocked to find out that in Beaumont dancing is against the
law. The small-minded and fearful town council, led by the Rev. Shaw Moore
(Gary Chambers) passed the repressive law after four local youth ran off a
bridge and were killed coming home from a dance. In their minds dancing leads
to drinking and other outrageous behavior. Of course, Ren thinks the law is
absurd, and he rallies his high school classmates to fight against it.

As always in shows like this
there is a love story subplot. Ariel, Rev. Moore’s daughter, dates the town bad
guy, Chuck Cranston (Nick Clawson) as an act of rebellion. Inevitably, she
falls for Ren — this is a romantic musical, after all.

I was struck from the beginning
with the stark and gritty set, a building with an industrial look with five
large double doors and a balcony. It could be a train station of a warehouse,
or almost anything, and serves as backdrop throughout as a myriad of scenes
from a school to a church to town chamber room to a dance hall. The versatility
of this set works beautifully. It reminded me immediately of the loft building
set in Rent, and the play’s
exuberance and celebration of rebellion also reminded me of that grittier and
more realistic musical, as well as the classic West Side Story.

As is typical of Tacoma Musical
Playhouse, the cast is large, and there are terrific big numbers with a
talented ensemble dancing and singing.

Furnstahl is beautiful, and she
convincingly plays Ariel as a complex character. Even though she looks young
enough to be a high school senior, which Ariel is, I suspected Furnstahl was at
least in her mid-twenties because of the confidence and subtlety of her acting.
I was surprised to read in the program that she is, indeed, a senior at Sumner
High School. Watch for this young actor; she is destined for big things in
musical theater.

Cameron Waters was outstanding
as Willard, the loveable misfit. His crazy dancing and his overall performance
on the song “Mama Says” were the comical highlights of the show.

Also outstanding in supporting
roles were Clawson as the epitome of juvenile delinquency and Corissa Deverse
as Ariel’s friend and Willard’s girlfriend, Rusty. What a great voice she has.

Finally, kudos to Atwood for
bringing the house down with his every move. His energetic and athletic dancing
is astounding (TMP audiences saw that in his tap-dancing role as Scuttle the
seagull in the recent production of The
Little Mermaid.

Special kudos to Tacoma Musical
Playhouse for using this show to raise money for Orange Community Players, a
community theater in the real town of Beaumont that was almost totally destroyed
by Hurricane Harvey.

Washington
State History Museum offers a rare opportunity to see the visual diary,
drawings and watercolor paintings of a Japanese-American held in the relocation
center in Puyallup and the internment camp at Minidoka, Idaho.

Takuichi
Fujii was a small businessman and well-known local artist in Seattle at the
beginning of World War II. Swept up along with his wife and two daughters, as
was almost every Japanese-American on the West Coast, he was confined in the
relocation center in Puyallup from May to August 1942, and then to Minidoka,
where he and his family were held until October 1945. A prolific artist, Fujii
documented the scenes and the life at both camps in a personal diary and in
watercolors and ink drawings. About 70 artworks from this time period and
including later works from when he lived in Chicago after the war, are on
display in two galleries at WSHM. The galleries are small, and the paintings
can be seen in a short visit, but visitors should linger long and attentively
over each work because they illustration a life lived during one of the most
horrendous events in American history, and because Fujii was an excellent
artist whose works demand attention.

In
the smaller of the two galleries we are given an overview glimpse into his art
before and after his wartime experiences. The earlier works are realistic and
simplified. In the later years he moved into more abstract work with his final
paintings being strong black-and-white abstract paintings in a style similar to
that of Franz Kline.

The
larger of the two galleries is dedicated to his wartime art, which was unknown
until they were rediscovered after his death by his grandson, Sandy Kita. These
drawings and paintings have never been shown publicly.

The
diary he began in the relocation camp at Puyallup is displayed in a closed case
but all of the nearly 400 pages can be viewed digitally.

Work
done before the war include self-portraits, pictures of downtown Seattle. There
is a portrait of his daughter titled “High School Girl” (1934-35) that shows a
strong influence of such painters as Cezanne and Braque and other forerunners
of cubism. The Seattle scenes and a painting of the Rock Island Dam on the
Columbia River. There are paintings from the beginning of the war showing
American citizens of Japanese descent reading the signs tacked to light poles
and fences announcing that they must report to the relocation center,
essentially that your life, your home and your business are over.

The
pictures from Puyallup and Minidoka are stark and simple. More of them picture
the camp buildings and the desert than the people. There are pictures of the
barracks and the latrines, the crowded train that took them to Minidoka, and
incident where they saw a rattlesnake I the desert.

“The
exhibition tells the story of Fujii’s individual will to persist, both as an
artist and a citizen, and provides a rare glimpse into exactly what that
experience was like,” said the museum’s director of audience engagement, Mary
Mikel Stump, who summed up the exhibition saying it is all about Fujii’s
individual experience. This critic would add that it is also about the talent
and dedication of an artist whose work parallels trends in art history from the
1920s and ‘30s through the 1950s.

Neil Simon’s “Rumors” at Tacoma
Little Theatre is loud, raucous, fast-paced, witty and pretty much over the top
from curtain to curtain, and the laughter of the opening night crowd was just
as loud as the gesticulating and shouting actors on stage. There is little
subtlety or nuance in this comedy. But where there is subtlety, it is golden —
as when the overly nervous Chris Gorman (sharply portrayed by Jess Allan) gets
mad at one of the other guests and hisses like a cat. It’s an action that takes
no more than two seconds, but it is perfectly played and brings down the house.

The action takes place in the
Manhattan apartment of the Deputy Mayor of New York and his wife, neither of
whom ever appear on stage. It is their 10th anniversary and they’re
throwing a party, but when the guests arrive, Charlie, the Deputy Mayor, has
attempted suicide and missed, just shooting his ear lobe. He is shut up on an
upstairs bedroom and his wife has left. Nobody knows where she has gone.

The beauty of setting the play
in a single apartment on a single evening is that no set or costume changes are
required — except when Lenny (Matt Garry) comes downstairs wearing a bathrobe
and sporting a bandaged ear, pretending to be the Deputy Mayor and giving a couple
of incredulous cops a long and absurd explanation of why gunshots were reported
and why all the obviously well-heeled guests are acting so strange.

A lawyer named Ken (Mark
Peterson) and his wife, Chris (Allan), are the first guests to arrive, and Ken
decides nobody can know that Charlie shot himself. When the next guests arrive,
Lenny and his wife, Claire (Jill Heinecke), they make up stupid excuses about
why Charlie and his wife aren’t there, excuses that keep getting more and more
implausible because their stories are too wild to be believed. The plot
thickens when a psychiatrist named Ernie (Jefferry Swiney-Weaver) and his wife,
Cookie (Shelleigh-Mairi Ferguson) show up. Cookie, who stars in a cooking show
on TV and who periodically screams and contorts her body with severe back
spasms, volunteers to cook dinner because the servants are mysteriously
missing. Into this chaotic mixture come Glenn Cooper (Houston White), who is
running for state senator, and his wife, Cassie (Kristen Blegen Bouyer), a
new-agey vamp who keeps rubbing herself with a crystal and accusing her husband
or infidelity. There are a lot of whispered rumors of infidelity involving
various characters, thus the title, “Rumors.”

The cast is comprised of
experienced actors who not only play their parts well but are clearly having
fun doing it. They are every one deserving of special mention, but two in
particular stand out. They are Peterson and Garry. Peterson, who has a booming,
guttural voice and a demanding stage presence is sometimes overwhelming, but in
this role shouting and over acting is called for, and he does it magnificently.
And Garry is physically and verbally spot-on. In this role he reminds me of
classical comedians like Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleeson.

Finally, I must say the set by
Blake York is wonderful. The entire apartment with its staircase and
floor-to-ceiling windows is patterned after a Piet Mondrian painting with
everything but the diagonal of the staircase being rectangles and squares in
primary red, yellow, white and blue with black lines. It’s all a bit retro for
being set in 1989, but absolutely gorgeous.

If you like a good farce, this
one is one of the best, cleverly written and performed by great actors.
Warning: there is a liberal sprinkling of language that might be offensive to
some.

Detail shot of part of Pete Goldlust’s installation in the Woodworth windows, photos courtesy Spaceworks Tacoma.

When artworks first began
showing up in the windows of the old Woolworth building on 11th
Street between Broadway and Commerce, there was little sense of installing work
that was site specific. The walls were treated as gallery walls upon which
paintings were hung, not as the three-dimensional space it is, with a long,
narrow orientation and shallow depth more suitable for frieze-like
installations that read left-to-right like a book or scroll. More recently
artists have begun to utilize the space with much more awareness of its uniqueness
as an exhibition space.

Pete Goldlust’s current
installation turns the walls of the corner section on the Broadway side into a
kind of backdrop for comic hieroglyphs. The wall that turns the corner is
filled with cut-out figures on cardboard that are painted white with black outlines
and lines and dots to indicate features such as comical eyes and noses. They
are mounted so as to extend out from the wall to various degrees, and the raw,
unpainted brown of the cardboard edges remain untouched. There are blimps,
bicycles, plants, and strange undersea creatures drawn in a manner reminiscent
of Dr. Suess and Keith Haring. Or perhaps even more reminiscent of the late
paintings of Phillip Guston, especially the line quality and drawing style.

“I strive to produce work that fosters a
sense of wonder, joy, and play. I look to draw out these qualities, often
dormant within the history of each site. The work is firmly rooted in
pop-surrealist tradition, with plenty of influence from Dr. Seuss and
independent comics,” Goldlust writes in a statement on the Spaceworks website.

The walls and floor are bright fuchsia, making for the
strongest contrast imaginable between figures and background. These are joyful
and playful works. I saw them in the daytime, but I can imagine them appearing
as bright as the lights of Broadway when lighted at night — the other Broadway,
the one of theatrical fame.

On the Commerce side, there is a display of prints from
Wayzgoose that makes the windows look more like a collage of 1930s-style
political posters and less like individual works displayed on a gallery wall.
The reasons it doesn’t look like a typical display are first, because the
prints are attached to the inside surface of the front windows instead of on
the walls, and second, because there is no space between the individual prints.

For those who might not know, artists working with Wayzgoose create
prints by laying the inked plates on the road and rolling over them with a
steamroller. The production is done as an annual event, with a different theme
each year. This year’s theme is “Unlucky Tacoma.”

I like seeing the entire window of prints as a single work, but
I equally enjoy the individual prints. Ones that stand out in my mind are Katie
Dean’s dreamy fantasy scene with mythological creatures in a riverside park,
Audra Laymond’s “Against the Walls of Every Power BLOW the small trumpet of
your defiance,” and one attributed to PLU called “Typhoon,” witch depicts a
hurricane of wind-blown letters energetically flowing across a tropical island.

Friday, September 15, 2017

The Greater Tacoma Community 10th Foundation of Art Award is among the
year’s biggest arts events. Purportedly, the exhibition represents the best of
the best. Every year for 10 years jurors chosen from among Tacoma’s art
professionals have nominated local artists for a major prize, and every year
the nominees and the annual winner have been featured in an art exhibition.
This year, since it is the 10th Foundation of Art Award, 10 winners
were chosen, and each was given a greatly deserved $1,000 cash award. This
year’s show held at the Spaceworks Gallery showcases works not only by this
year’s winners but by winners from each the past nine years.

To write about all 19 artworks in the space allowed is not
possible. Instead, I shall mention some of the highlights and encourage readers
to visit the gallery and see them all.

Mandy Barker’s “Strata Discs” is a fascinating painting in
acrylic, metal leaf, and ink on paper mounted on wood. Pictured are three
circles of various sizes and varying distances from the wall, each decorated
with ornate animal-themed painting in brilliant colors. It is a delightful and
exciting piece that requires careful attention to suss out what all is
pictured.

Glass artist Oliver Doriss’s “Blue Moon” is a small piece on
a sculpture stand consisting of two small blocks of acrylic within which are
crumbled and flattened aluminum foil. peering into the acrylic is like viewing
bits of ancient rock or wood through a magnifying glass. Space and time seem
condensed by art.

Speaking of time, Nicholas Nyland’s “Slab Basket” has the
look of an ancient artifact dug up from an archeological site. It is a globe of
overlapping slabs of stoneware with open space between the slabs fired with
earthy tones of pink and purple. There is a majestic and timeless quality to
this one.

Janet Marcavage’s screen print “Cools” is a study in illusion
and perception. Curvilinear lines in various tones of blue and white are put
together in six interlocking round shapes that have the quality of rhythmic
movement seen as striped patterns of cloth blowing in the wind.

Heather Undine’s “Undine” is a ceramic bust of a woman
emerging from a circular shell-like formation, or perhaps it is intended as
floral leaves from which her head and shoulders appear. It reminds me of
Botticelli’s “Venus” except that it depicts strength rather than the idealized
beauty of the “Venus.” Judging from the title, my guess would be it is a
self-portrait. If so, it is as unflinchingly unflattering as a Rembrandt
self-portrait.

Other pieces I found to be particularly impressive are works
by Lisa Kinoshita, Elise Richman and Sean Alexander.

All of Tacoma should turn out for the reception gala Thursday, Sept. 21.

More than
6,000 folded paper cranes by nationally known artist Clarissa Sligh hang from
the ceilings and cling to the walls of Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget
Sound. Many of the cranes are made from the pages of white supremacist books, plus there are dramatic black-and-white photographs
of people who are or might be the targets of white supremacist hate, and
close-up, high-contrast photos of some of the individual cranes.

The show
is called Am I Safe?

These
works transform hate speech into artworks of calm contemplation, as stated in a
press release that goes on to say, “Her artists’ books, photos, and prints
examine personal identities and fears in an unequal world.” Some of the
artists’ books are displayed in a companion show in Collins Memorial Library on
the UPS campus.

Sligh’s
work balances the conceptual and the aesthetic, the symbolic and the literal.
In Japan, the crane is a mystical creature believed to live for a thousand years.
In Japanese, Chinese and Korean cultures, cranes represent good fortune and longevity.
Juxtaposing them with photos of hate-targeted people is the height of irony.

Four
clusters of cranes of many colors hang from the ceiling in the middle of the
gallery. They are black, white, silver and other colors, and are strung
together with many colored beads. The black ones are dull, or matt. Others are
shiny. Close examination reveals that the white ones are made from maps.
Compositionally the various colors group together — whites together, blacks
together, and so forth — in patterns that play off against each other within
and against each hanging group like a kind of bizarre dance of different
colored dancers.

Against
one wall there is a lineup of black and white photographs of multicultural
faces with the artist’s face near the center, and against another wall there is
a line of photographs of people of color behind a scrim of hanging cranes in
black, white and gold; the white ones in this group are made from pages of hate
literature.

Against
another wall there is a large offset lithograph and digital collage called
“Women Bring the People.” It shows pictures of women in various configurations.
The central figure is a naked woman collaged of images of possibly the same and
possibly different women put together in such a way as to make it look like
she’s been folded in half. I can’t begin to imagine the intended meaning of
this image, but I can say it is disturbing at best and horrifying at worst.

Sligh’s installation fills the larger front gallery. The smaller back
gallery presents a show of sumi drawings, paintings and collages by local
artist Fumiko Kimura, founder of Puget Sound Sumi Artists. Kumura’s show is
called One. Dot. Sumi. It includes
lovely and delicate pictures of landscapes, flowers, birds and insects in a
lyrical painting style based on the ancient art of calligraphy.

Friday, September 1, 2017

The Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play August: Osage County by Tracy Letts is a play unlike any other. The story unfolds, or should we say erupts, over a few weeks in the rural Oklahoma home of Beverly and Violet Weston. It opens with Beverly, a crusty but kindly old drunk played by the inimitable Russ Holm, hiring Johnna, a young Cherokee woman (Mackenzie Platt), as a housekeeper. “My wife takes pills and I drink,” he tells her. Not long after, Beverly disappears and ...Read the complete review on olyarts.org at www.northwestmilitary.com/music-and-culture/stage-and-visual-reviews/2017/08/august-osage-county/or the Weekly Volcano at www.northwestmilitary.com/music-and-culture/stage-and-visual-reviews/2017/08/august-osage-county/

In
the art of Troy Gua we see the reincarnation of the minds of Andy Warhol and
Marcel Duchamp. His art is conceptual, brilliant, funny, and
drawn/painted/built with exquisite craftsmanship.

He
is famous regionally, and should be famous nationally and even internationally,
for his pop hybrid portraits of celebrities and for his series of hand-made
dolls, books and videos for the artist formerly and
forever known as Prince.

The
pop hybrid portraits are portraits of famous people painted in a pop art
fashion much like Warhol’s famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley
and others. They are more precisely painted than Warhol’s and without his colors
printed off-register. The unique character of Gua’s portraits is that he
typically combines and overlaps two or more portraits in such a way that they
might look like one of the subjects and then change in the viewer’s eye to the
other. Sometimes figuring out who they are is a delectable puzzle. Often he
combines people who have things in common, be it a name or profession or other
similarities, such as Martin Luther King and Elvis (the King of rock and roll),
or computer pioneers Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In reviewing his show at
Fulcrum Gallery for this newspaper in 2013, I described his pop hybrids as
“slick and polished as custom
made cars and as clever as the most inspired work of a Madison Avenue ad
writer." Now they are even more polished. The earlier ones were painted in
acrylic on canvas; the new ones are sealed with a resin coating.

There are two pop hybrids in this show,
one of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein called “The Brains and Beauty (First
Try)” and one that is a self-portrait combined with Prince. Which brings us to
“Le Petit Prince.”

Gua clearly loves Prince. Over the years
he has made countless little handmade dolls
of Prince and put them in many different settings and made movies and
books about him. At one point the rock idol’s lawyers hit Gua with a cease-and-desist order.

There is a “Le Petit Prince” corner in
the gallery with a video,abook and two Prince-like dolls of Gua and his wife on
a couch watching the video. As the pop-hybrid
portrait indicates, the Prince and Gua have become so thoroughly associated in
his art that it becomes almost impossible to tell them apart.

In addition to these works, there is an
intriguing memorial to 9/11 with two blank canvases standing in for the twin
towers and a “paper airplane” made of folded canvas flying into one of the
towers. There are also a number of pieces that make sly references to art
galleries such as “Sold,” a red dot on the head of a pin in a white shadow box
— referencing the reddots that are traditionally place next to artworks in
galleries that have sold.

There is
also a group of large commercial logos for imaginary companies that are cast in
resin and make for stunningly beautiful abstract sculptures and similarly two
sets of emojis set as hieroglyphics of the future.

The show is called SMÖRGÅSBORD because it is a
mixture of many different works done over a ten-year period. Only a fraction of it is mentioned in this review,
and even a smaller fraction is shown at Feast. I highly recommend that you
visit the show to see the work in person, and then lookthe artist up online to see examples of the many varied works he has
produced.

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About Me

I am an artist and writer living in Olympia, Washington. I write an art review column, a theater review column and arts features for the Weekly Volcano, a community theater review column for The (Tacoma) News Tribune and regular arts features for OLY ARTS (Olympia).
My published novels are: This Is Me, Debbi, David; Tupelo; The Freedom Trilogy (a three-book series consisting of The Backside of Nowhere, Return to Freedom and Visual Liberties); Reunion at the Wetside; The Wives of Marty Winters; Imprudent Zeal and Until the Dawn. I've also published a book on art, As If Art Matters. All are available on amazon.com.
I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988 where I am active in many progressive organizations such as PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).